THE BIOGRAPHY
OF
A BABY
BY
MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED
IN THE U. S. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. BABY BIOGRAPHIES IN GENERAL 1
II. THE NEW-BORN BABY: STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENTS 20
III. THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS 39
IV. THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS 58
V. BEGINNINGS OF EMOTION AND PROGRESS IN SENSE POWERS 78
VI. PROGRESS TOWARD GRASPING 99
VII. SHE LEARNS TO GRASP, AND DISCOVERS THE WORLD OF THINGS 118
VIII. THE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS 141
IX. THE DAWN OF INTELLIGENCE 161
X. BEGINNINGS OF LOCOMOTION 182
XI. CREEPING AND STANDING 203
XII. RUDIMENTS OF SPEECH; CLIMBING AND PROGRESS TOWARD WALKING 224
XIII. WALKING ALONE; DEVELOPING INTELLIGENCE 238
THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BABY
I
BABY BIOGRAPHIES IN GENERAL
“It is a well recognized fact in the history of science that the very
subjects which concern our dearest interests, which lie nearest our
hearts, are exactly those which are the last to submit to scientific
methods, to be reduced to scientific law. Thus it has come to pass
that while babies are born and grow up in every household, and while
the gradual unfolding of their faculties has been watched with the
keenest interest and intensest joy by intelligent and even scientific
fathers and mothers from time immemorial, yet very little has yet been
done in the scientific study of this most important of all possible
subjects--the ontogenetic evolution of the faculties of the human mind.
“Only in the last few years has scientific attention been drawn to the
subject at all. Its transcendent importance has already enlisted many
observers, but on account of the great complexity of the phenomena, and
still more the intrinsic difficulty of their interpretation, scientific
progress has scarcely yet commenced.
“What is wanted most of all in this, as in every science, is _a body
of carefully observed facts_. But to be an accomplished investigator
in this field requires a rare combination of qualities. There must be
a wide intelligence combined with patience in observing and honesty
in recording. There must be also an earnest scientific spirit,
a loving sympathy with the subject of investigation, yet under
watchful restraint, lest it cloud the judgment; keenness of intuitive
perception, yet soberness of judgment in interpretation.”
I have appropriated these words of Dr. Joseph Le Conte because the
general reader is not likely to see them where they were originally
printed, in a little university study, and it is a pity to let the
general reader miss so good an introduction to the subject. Not all
learned men rate baby biography as highly as Dr. Le Conte does; but
probably all biologists do, and those psychologists who are most
strongly impressed with the evolutionary interpretation of life.
It is easy to see why one’s views of evolution affect the matter.
In botany, for instance, we do not think that we can understand the
mature plant by studying it alone, without knowledge of its germinating
period. If we omitted all study of radicle and plumule and cotyledon,
we should not only lose an interesting chapter from the science, but
even the part we kept, the classification and morphology and physiology
of the grown plant itself, would be seriously misunderstood in some
ways. So in other sciences: it is necessary to understand how things
came to be what they are, to study the _process of becoming_, so to
speak, before the completed result can be understood. This is what we
mean by “the genetic method” of studying a subject.
Now, in proportion as one believes that the faculties of the human mind
unfold by evolutionary law, like a plant from the germ, he will feel
the need of studying these also genetically. As we find them in our
grown selves, they are often perplexing. What seems a single complete,
inborn faculty may really be made up of simpler ones, so fused together
by long practice that they cannot be discerned. We know that this is
the case with seeing. For instance, we give a glance at a ball, and see
its form with a single act of mind. Yet that act became possible only
after long drill in putting simpler perceptions together. Many a test
of form, turning objects over and over, passing the hands round and
round them, learning the absence of corners, the equality of diameters,
did we go through in babyhood, many an inspection by eye, many an
exercise of memory, connecting the peculiar arrangement of light and
shade with the form as felt, before we could “see” a ball. Had this
been understood in Froebel’s time, it would have made a material
difference in his suggestions as to sense training in earliest infancy.
So other powers that seem simple and inborn may perhaps be detected in
the act of forming themselves out of simpler ones, if we watch babies
closely enough, and it may lead us to revise some of our theories about
education.
There are enthusiasts, indeed, who would have us believe that child
study is going to revolutionize all our educational methods, but
those who are surest of these wonderful results, and readiest to
tell mothers and teachers what is the truly scientific thing to do
with their children, are not the ones who have done the most serious
first hand study of children. From indications so far, it is likely
that the outcome of such study will oftener be to confirm some good
old-fashioned ways of training (showing that they rested unconsciously
on a sound psychological basis) than to discover new ways. No
substitute has yet been found by scientific pedagogy for motherly good
sense and devotion.
Yet the direct study of child minds does bring out some new suggestions
of educational value, does give a verdict sometimes between old
conflicting theories, and always makes us understand more clearly what
we are doing with children. And on the purely scientific side there
is one aspect of especial interest in genetic studies. That is, the
possible light we may get on the past of the human race.
It has long been observed that there are curious resemblances between
babies and monkeys, between boys and barbaric tribes. Schoolboys
administer law among themselves much as a tribal court does; babies
sit like monkeys, with the soles of their little feet facing each
other. Such resemblances led, long before the age of Darwin, to the
speculation that children in developing passed through stages similar
to those the race had passed through; and the speculation has become an
accepted doctrine since embryology has shown how each individual before
birth passes in successive stages through the lower forms of life.
This series of changes in the individual is called by evolutionists the
Ontogenic Series; and the similar series through which the race has
passed in the myriads of ages of its evolution is called the Phylogenic.
Now, of these two versions of the great world history, the phylogenic
is a worn and ancient volume, mutilated in many places, and often
illegible. The most interesting chapter of all is torn out--that which
records the passing over of man from brute to human, the beginning of
true human reason, speech, and skill. The lowest living races are far
beyond the transition line; the remains of the past can never tell us
how it was crossed, for before man could leave anything more than
bones--any products of his art, such as weapons, or signs of fire--he
had traveled a long way from his first human condition.
But from the ontogenic record no chapter can be torn out: a fresh copy
of the whole history, from alpha to omega, is written out every time
an infant is conceived, and born, and grows to manhood. And somewhere
on the way between the first cell of the embryo and maturity each
one must repeat in his own life that wonderful transition into human
intelligence. If we can thoroughly decipher tills ontogenic record,
then, what may we not hope to learn of the road by which we human
beings came?
We must not forget that the correspondence between these life books
is only a rough one. They are versions of the same world story, but
they have traveled far from their common origin, and have become
widely unlike in details. The baby has to take many short cuts, and
condense and omit inconceivably, to get through in a few brief years a
development that the race took ages for. Even the order of development
gets disarranged sometimes. For instance, primitive man probably
reached a higher development before he could talk than babies have
to now, after ages of talking ancestry: we must not look to a child
just learning to talk, to get an idea of what the minds of men were
like when _they_ were just learning to talk. Again, the human child is
carrying on under the influence of adults an evolution that primitive
man worked out without help or hindrance from any one wiser than
himself; and that makes a great difference in the way he does it.
The moral of all this is that people should be very cautious indeed
in drawing parallels between the child and the race, and especially
in basing educational theories on them. But if one is cautious enough
and patient enough, there are many hints about our race history to be
found in every nursery. Some of these I shall relate in the following
chapters.
* * * * *
Most studies of children deal with later childhood, the school years;
and these are almost always statistical in their method, taking the
individual child very little into account. My own study has been
of babyhood, and its method has been biographical. It is hard to
get statistics about babies, scattered as they are, one by one, in
different homes, not massed in schoolrooms. Now and then a doctor has
found material for good comparative investigations, and much effort has
been spent in trying to gather up measurements of babies’ growth; but
on the whole the most fruitful method so far has been the biographical
one--that of watching one baby’s development, day by day, and recording
it.
I am often asked if the results one gets in this way are not
misleading, since each child might differ greatly from others. One
must, of course, use great caution in drawing general conclusions
from a single child, but in many things all babies are alike, and one
learns to perceive pretty well which are the things. Babyhood is mainly
taken up with the development of the large, general racial powers;
individual differences are less important than in later childhood. And
the biographical method of child study has the inestimable advantage of
showing the process of evolution going on, the actual unfolding of one
stage out of another, and the steps by which the changes come about. No
amount of comparative statistics could give this. If I should find out
that a thousand babies learned to stand at an average age of forty-six
weeks and two days, I should not know as much that is important about
standing, as a stage in human progress, as I should after watching a
single baby carefully through the whole process of achieving balance on
his little soles.
Yet there are not many baby biographies in existence. There are
scarcely half a dozen records that are full and consecutive enough
to be at all entitled to the name, and even of more fragmentary ones
the number in print as separate essays is scarcely larger. A good
many more, however, have been available in manuscript to students,
and many mothers no doubt keep such little notebooks. These notes are
often highly exact and intelligent, as far as they go (I have found
this especially true of the notebooks of members of the Association of
Collegiate Alumnæ), and afford important corroborations here and there
to more continuous records.
It was the Germans who first thought baby life worth recording, and the
most complete and scientific of all the records is a German one. The
first record known was published in the last century by a Professor
Tiedemann--a mere slip of an essay, long completely forgotten, but
resuscitated about the middle of this century, translated into French
(and lately into English), and used by all students of the subject.
Some of its observations we must, with our present knowledge, set
down as erroneous; but it is on the whole exact and valuable, and a
remarkable thing for a man to have done more than a hundred years ago.
Perhaps Darwin, in 1840, was the next person to take notes of an
infant’s development; but they were taken only incidentally to another
study, and were not published for more than thirty years (partly in
“The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1873, partly in
a magazine article in 1877). They are scanty but important. In the
interval before they were published two or three small records had been
published in Germany, and at least one paper, that of M. Taine, in
France.
In 1881, the first edition of Professor Preyer’s “model record” was
published, and before his death, in 1897, it had reached its third
edition in Germany, and had been widely circulated in America in Mr.
Brown’s excellent translation, “The Senses and the Will,” and “The
Development of the Intellect.” It did more to stimulate and direct
the study of infancy than any other publication. It has, however, the
limitations that were to be expected from Professor Preyer’s special
training as a physiologist, and is meagre on the side of mental, moral,
and emotional development. Professor Sully’s “Extracts from a Father’s
Diary,” published in part in 1881 and 1884 and fully in 1896, is richer
on these sides, and also more readable.
Within the present decade, it is worth observing, the principal records
have been American, not German, and have been written by women. Outside
of America, only men, usually university professors, have made extended
records. Professor Preyer and Professor Sully have both appealed in
vain to their countrywomen to keep such records, holding up American
women for emulation. My “Notes on the Development of a Child” were
published in 1893 and 1899. In 1896 appeared Mrs. Hall’s “The First
500 Days of a Child’s Life,” a brief record, and confined to a short
period, but a very good one, and perhaps the best for use as a guide
by any one who wishes to keep a record and finds Preyer too technical.
Mrs. Moore’s “Mental Development of a Child” is quite as much a
psychological study as a record, but is based on full biographical
notes; it will be more used by students than general readers. Mrs.
Hogan’s “A Study of a Child,” 1898, is less scholarly than the others,
but has a great deal of useful material; it does not begin at birth,
however, but with the fourteenth month.
Perhaps I should say a word here as to the way in which I came to make
a baby biography, for I am often asked how one should go to work at it.
It was not done in my case for any scientific purpose, for I did not
feel competent to make observations of scientific value. But I had for
years desired an opportunity to see the wonderful unfolding of human
powers out of the limp helplessness of the new-born baby; to watch this
fascinating drama of evolution daily, minutely, and with an effort to
understand it as far as I could, for my own pleasure and information.
I scarcely know whence the suggestion had come; probably almost by
inheritance, for my mother and grandmother had both been in somewhat
notable degree observers of the development of babies’ minds. But,
unlike them, I had the notebook habit from college and editorial days,
and jotted things down as I watched, till quite unexpectedly I found
myself in possession of a large mass of data.
A few days after my own notes began I obtained Professor Preyer’s
record, and without it I should have found the earliest weeks quite
unintelligible. For some months my notes were largely memoranda of the
likenesses and differences between my niece’s development and that
of Preyer’s boy, and I still think this is the best way for a new
observer to get started. As time went on, I departed more and more from
the lines of Preyer’s observations, and after the first year was little
influenced by them. Later, I devoted a good deal of study to the notes,
and tried to analyze their scientific results.
There is one question that I have been asked a hundred times about
baby biography: “Doesn’t it do the children some harm? Doesn’t it make
them nervous? Doesn’t it make them self-conscious?” At first this
seemed to me an odd misapprehension--as if people supposed observing
children meant doing something to them. But I have no doubt it could
be so foolishly managed as to harm the child. There are thousands of
parents who tell anecdotes about children before their faces every
day in the year, and if such a parent turns child student it is hard
to say what he may not do in the way of dissecting a child’s mind
openly, questioning the little one about himself, and experimenting
with his thoughts and feelings. But such observing is as worthless
scientifically as it is bad for the child: the whole value of an
observation is gone as soon as the phenomena observed lose simplicity
and spontaneity. It should be unnecessary to say that no competent
observer tampers with the child in any way. If Professor Preyer,
observing the baby as he first grasps at objects, notes down the way
in which he misdirects his inexpert little hands; if Mrs. Barus keeps
record of her boy’s favorite playthings; if I sit by the window and
catch with my pencil my niece’s prattle as she plays about below--and
if these babies afterward turn out spoiled, the mischief must be
credited to some other agency than the silent notebook.
Even direct experimenting on a child is not so bad as it sounds. When
you show a baby his father’s photograph to see if he recognizes it,
you are experimenting on him. The only difference between the child
student’s experimenting and that which all the members of the family
are doing all day with the baby, is that the student knows better what
he is trying to find out, and that he writes it down.
Probably women are more skillful than men in quietly following the
course of the child’s mind, even leading him to reveal himself without
at all meddling with him or marring his simplicity. It has been so
in a marked degree in the cases I have seen. But no one who has good
judgment will allow himself to spoil both the child and his own
observation; and any one who has not good judgment will find plenty of
ways to spoil a child more potent than observing him.
II
THE NEW-BORN BABY: STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENTS.
“Its first act is a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout
of joy, as Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then long, thin,
tearless _á--á_, with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic,
but of discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red,
shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the
first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged,
it is not strange that, if the mother has not followed Froebel’s
exhortations and come to love her child before birth, there is a brief
interval occasionally dangerous to the child before the maternal
instinct is fully aroused.”
It cannot be denied that this unflattering description is fair enough,
and our baby was no handsomer than the rest of her kind. The little boy
uncle, who had been elated to hear that his niece resembled him, looked
shocked and mortified when he saw her. Yet she did not lack admirers.
I have never noticed that women (even those who are not mothers) mind
a few little æsthetic defects, such as these that President Hall
mentions, with so many counterbalancing charms in the little warm,
soft, living thing.
Nor is it women only who find the new baby enchanting--in Germany, at
least. Semmig, whose “Tagebuch eines Vaters” is one of the earliest
attempts at a record, is delighted even with the “dismal and monotonous
cry.” “Heavenly music of the first cry!” he exclaims, “sacred voice of
life, first sound of the poem of a heart, first note of the symphony
of human life, thou echo of God’s word! What sound is like unto thee?”
“Yes, it is so: the cry of the baby is music! When it is still,
especially in the night, one is uneasy; one longs for this primitive
expression of the little being, and is consoled, enraptured, when the
helpless creature breaks into loud wails, and says to us: I live, give
me what I need! Oh, cry of the baby in the night, nightingale song for
mother and father!”
Our baby was at least a handsome one from the doctor’s point of view,
strong, healthy, and well formed; and this is to be taken into account
as a determining factor in all the record that follows.
I thought that she must be out of the normal in the matter of legs,
so oddly brief were the fat little members. Afterward I learned that
all babies are built that way--and indeed that they are altogether
so different in structure from the grown man that Dr. Oppenheim, in
his book on “The Development of the Child,” comes near to saying that
we must regard the infant as a different animal form from the adult,
almost as the caterpillar is different from the butterfly. Common
speech recognizes this in the case of several of the higher animals,
naming the young form as differently as if it were a different species.
We say a colt, a calf, a puppy, a baby; not a young horse, cow, dog, or
man.
We call a baby a little copy of the man, but really if he were
magnified to man’s size and strength, we should regard him at first
glance as an idiot and monster, with enormous head and abdomen, short
legs, and no neck, not to speak of the flat-nosed, prognathous face;
and on the other hand, a baby that was really a small copy of man’s
body would seem positively uncanny. We see this in old pictures, where
the artist tried to depict babies by placing small-sized men and women
in the mother’s arms.
The middle point of the baby’s length falls a little above the navel,
the abdomen and legs together making up a little more than half the
whole length; in the man the legs alone make a trifle more than half.
In proportion to the baby’s total weight, its brain weighs seven times
as much as a grown person’s, its muscles little more than half as much.
“The two [man and baby] do not breathe alike, their pulse rates are not
alike, the composition of their bodies is not alike.” The baby’s body
at birth is 74.7 per cent. water, ours 58.5 per cent. It is largely due
to its loose, watery structure that the baby’s brain is so heavy--which
shows the folly of trying to compare mental powers by means of brain
weights, as is so often done in discussing woman’s sphere. As Donaldson
says, if there were anything in that basis of comparison, the new-born
baby would be the intellectual master of us all. The baby has bright
red and watery marrow, instead of the yellow, fatty substance in
our bones; and its blood differs so from ours in proportion of red
and white corpuscles and in chemical make-up as to “amount almost
to a difference in kind,” says Dr. Oppenheim, who adds that such a
condition of marrow or blood, if found in a grown person, would be
considered an indication of disease.
The organs are differently placed within the body, and even differently
formed. The bony structure is everywhere soft and unfinished, the
plates of the skull imperfectly fitted together, with gaps at the
corners; and it is well that they are, for if the brain box were closed
tight the brain within could never grow. Surgeons have lately even made
artificial openings where the skull was prematurely perfect, to save
the baby from idiocy. The bony inclosures of the middle ear are quite
unfinished, so that on the one side catarrhal inflammations from the
nose and throat travel up to the ear more readily than in later life,
while on the other side ear inflammations are more likely to pass into
the brain. The spine is straight, like an ape’s, instead of having the
double curve of human-kind, which seems to be brought about by the pull
of the muscles after we have come to stand erect.
I have quoted these details from Oppenheim, and from Vierordt’s and
Roberts’s measurements, as given by Dr. Burk (“Growth of Children
in Height and Weight.”) Some of the figures are given otherwise by
other authorities. I might fill many pages with similar details. Some
of these differences do not disappear till full manhood, others are
gone in a few weeks after birth. And in them all there is so constant
a repetition of lower animal forms that anatomists are brought to a
confidence in the “recapitulation doctrine,” such as they can hardly
give to others by means of a few sample facts.
The most curious of all the monkey traits shown by the new-born baby
is the one investigated by Dr. Louis Robinson (“Nineteenth Century,”
November, 1891). It was suggested by “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” The
question was raised in conversation whether a limp and molluscous baby,
unable so much as to hold up its head on its helpless little neck,
could do anything so positive as to “rastle with” Kentuck’s finger;
and the more knowing persons present insisted that a young baby does,
as a matter of fact, have a good firm hand-clasp. It occurred to Dr.
Robinson that if this was true it was a beautiful Darwinian point, for
clinging and swinging by the arms would naturally have been a specialty
with our ancestors if they ever lived a monkey-like life in the trees.
The baby that could cling best to its mother as she used hands, feet,
and tail to flee in the best time over the trees, or to get at the more
inaccessible fruits and eggs in time of scarcity, would be the baby
that lived to bequeath his traits to his descendants; so that to this
day our housed and cradled human babies would keep in their clinging
powers a reminiscence of our wild treetop days.
Dr. Robinson was fortunate enough to be able to test his theory on some
sixty babies in the first hours of their life, and was triumphantly
successful. He clasped their hands about a slender rod, and they swung
from it like athletes, without apparent discomfort, by the half minute;
many of us grown people could not do as well. Such a remarkable power
of hands and arms has for ages been of no especial use to the human
race, and it fades out in a few weeks, but for many months the arms
keep ahead of the legs in development.
Here was not only strength of arms, but the ability to perform quite
skillfully an action, that required the working together of a number of
muscles to a definite end,--the action namely, of clasping an object
with the hand. This is one of several actions that come ready-made to
the baby at birth, before he can possibly have had any chance to learn
them, or any idea of what they are for. Babies sneeze, swallow, and
cry on the first day; they shut their eyes at a bright light, or at a
touch. On the first day, moreover, they have been seen to start at a
sound or a jar; Preyer observed hiccoughing, choking, coughing, and
spreading the toes when the soles were tickled; and Darwin saw yawning
and stretching within the first week, though I do not know that any one
has seen it on the first day.
These movements are all of the class called reflex,--movements, that
is, in which the bodily mechanism is set off by some outside action on
the senses, as a gun is set off by a touch on the trigger. Thus, when a
tickling affects the mucous membrane, a sneeze executes itself without
any will of ours; when our sense of sight perceives a swift missile
coming, the neck muscles mechanically jerk the head to one side.
We grown people have, however, a good deal of power of holding in our
reflexes,--“inhibiting” them, as the technical expression is,--but the
baby has none at all. If they had a highly developed reflex activity,
babies would be in real danger from the unrestrained acts of their own
muscles, as we see in the case of convulsions, which show reflex action
at its extreme. But the actions I have mentioned are about all the
reflex movements that have been noted in new-born babies, except what
are called the periodic reflexes, such as breathing, the heartbeat, the
contractions of the arteries, and all the regular muscular actions of
organic life.
That so complex a system of movement as these periodic reflexes should
be so readily touched into motion upon contact with air and food, to
maintain itself afterward by the interplay of the bodily mechanism
and external forces, shows a ready-made hereditary activity far more
than the sudden reflexes do. It does not work quite smoothly at first,
however: the establishment of breathing, for instance, is irregular,
and often difficult. Even the sudden reflexes are slower and less
perfect than with older people.
There is another class of movements, often confused with the
reflex--that is, instinctive movements. Real grasping (as distinguished
from reflex grasping), biting, standing, walking, are examples of this
class. They are race movements, the habits of the species to which
the animal belongs, and every normal member of the species is bound to
come to them; yet they are not so fixed in the bodily mechanism as the
reflex movements. The stimulus to them seems to come more from within
than from without--yet not from reason and will, but from some blind
impulse. This impulse is usually imperfect, and the child has to work
his own way to the mastery of the movements. Yet though certain reflex
activities are inherited in a more highly developed condition than any
human instincts, the instincts are at bottom _always_ hereditary, which
is not the case with the reflexes--any one may teach his muscles new
reflex movements, unknown to his ancestors. A musician does it every
time that he practices new music till his hands will run it off of
their own accord, while he is thinking of something else. But instinct
cannot be thus acquired.
The amazing instincts of the lower animals; the imperfect and broken
condition of the instincts in man, yet the deep hold that they have
on him; the mingling of inherited necessity and individual freedom in
the way in which they are worked out; the mystery of the physiological
method by which they act (while that of reflex movement is fairly well
understood, up to a certain point); the light they seem always about to
shed for the biologist on the profoundest problems of heredity, and for
the philosopher on those of free will and personality,--these things
make instinct one of the great fields of present research, and I must
not venture into it, though it is of importance in trying to understand
a baby.
I shall say only that while instinct does not appear in the lowest
animals (whose action is all of the reflex type), and is for a time a
sign of rising rank in the scale of life, it reaches its culmination
with the insects, and as we approach man it is the breaking up of the
instincts that is in its turn a sign of advancement to higher life.
The little chicken runs about as soon as it is out of its shell, and
even the monkey baby is able to take care of itself in a few months.
Nothing is so helpless as the human baby, and in that helplessness
is our glory, for it means that the activities of the race (as John
Fiske has so clearly shown) have become too many, too complex, too
infrequently repeated, to become fixed in the nervous structure before
birth; hence the long period after birth before the child comes to
full human powers. It is a maxim of biology (as well as the frequent
lesson of common observation) that while an organism is thus immature
and plastic, it may learn, it may change, it may rise to higher
development; and thus to infancy we owe the rank of the human race.
The one instinct the human baby always brings into the world already
developed is half a mere reflex act--that of sucking. It is started
as a reflex would be, by the touch of some object, pencil, finger, or
nipple, it may be, between the lips; but it does not act like a reflex
after that. It continues and ceases without reference to this external
stimulus, and a little later often begins without it, or fails to begin
when the stimulus is given. If it has originally a reflex character,
that character fades out, and leaves it a pure instinct.
These two types of automatic movement (for instinct, however
complicated later with volition, gives rise in these earliest days
to none but automatic movement) are both “purposive,” though not
purposed--that is, they are actions that are plainly adapted to some
end by ancestral intelligence or by natural selection. But there was
another type of movements more conspicuous in our baby than either, and
apparently quite nonpurposive. From the first day she moved slightly,
but almost constantly, the legs drawing up, the arms stirring, the eyes
and head rolling a little. Sometimes the features were distorted with
vague and meaningless grimaces. Most other observers report these
movements, and inexperienced ones say that the baby “felt with his
hands about his face,” or “tried to get his hands to his head.” Any
mother may convince herself that the baby has no will in the matter by
watching till he really does begin to try, weeks later, to turn his
head, put his hands to his mouth, kick up his legs: the difference in
the whole manner of the action is evident.
An odd explanation has been offered for these movements by Dr. Mumford,
an English physiologist. He holds that they have a singular resemblance
to those of swimming amphibians; that their prototype may be seen in
any aquarium; they are, in short, survivals of the period long before
the ape-like stage, long before any mammalian stage, when our ancestors
had not yet abandoned life in the waters.
Now, although it is quite true that biologists believe that if our
ancestry is traced far enough, it does lead back to the water, still
it seems hardly possible that in a human baby, whose structure passed
the amphibian stage long before birth, the most frequent movements
should hark back to that tremendous antiquity. It is more likely that
Preyer’s explanation is the correct one: viz., that the movements
are simply due to the rapid growth of nerve centres, which causes an
overflow of nervous force to the muscles and makes them contract at
haphazard. A certain regularity is given to these chance movements by
the tendency of nerve impulse to flow in the same paths where it has
flowed before, rather than in new ones, so that the muscles are drawn
toward the position they occupied before birth. This brings the hands
constantly up about the head--a fact that later has important results
in development.
These aimless movements are called “impulsive” by Preyer. I have
followed Bain and Mrs. Moore in calling them “spontaneous.”
There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore none
that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying shows
wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us that
babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner.
Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton;
and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a
mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has practically
neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious
automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. And it would
be a bold psychologist who should try to say what _germ_ of thought
and will lies enfolded in his helplessness. Certainly, the capacity
of developing will is there, and an automaton with such a capacity is
a more wonderful creature than the wise, thinking, willing baby of
nursery tradition would be.
If mothers would only reflect how little developed a baby’s mind is
at a year old, after all the progress of twelve months, they would see
that they rate the mental starting point altogether too high. And they
miss thus the whole drama of the swift and lovely unfolding of the soul
from its invisible germ--a drama that sometimes fairly catches one’s
breath in the throat with excitement and wonder.
III
THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS.
I have said that the baby began the world as an automaton, but a
conscious, feeling automaton. And what, then, were these feelings and
this consciousness? What was the outfit for beginning the world that
the little mind brought with it? When I asked such questions I was
skirting the edge of one of the great battle-grounds of philosophy.
Whether all human ideas are made up solely from one’s own experience of
the outer world as given him by his senses, or whether there are, on
the contrary, inborn ideas, implanted directly by nature or God,--this
is a question on which volumes have been written.
Did the baby start out ready equipped with ideas of space, personal
identity, time, causation, such as we find so ineradicable in our own
minds? That is, did she see objects about her, located in space, nearer
and farther, right and left, and all outside and separate from herself,
as we do? hear sounds coming from without, as we do? Did she feel
herself a separate thing from the outer world? Did she perceive events
as happening in time succession, one after another? And did she think
of one thing as happening because of another, so that, for instance,
she was capable of crying in order to cause her dinner to be brought?
The hope of answering such questions was the first stimulus to the
study of infants, and the earlier records are much occupied with them.
Philosophers nowadays are less disposed to think that we can prove
anything about the doctrine of innate ideas by finding whether babies
have such ideas to begin with; for we might indeed have ideas that came
direct from God, or from the nature of the mind, and yet might not
enter into our inheritance of these at once.
To me, however, not seeking to solve philosophical problems, but
only to watch and comprehend what was going on in the baby’s mind,
it was none the less interesting to try to make out the condition
of her senses and consciousness--though without the careful special
investigations certain physiologists had made before, I should have
found it blind guessing as to how much she really did see, hear, and
feel; for these processes, of course, went on inside her little mind,
and could only be inferred from her behavior.
She evidently felt a difference between light and darkness from the
first hour, for she stopped crying when her face was exposed to gentle
light; and other observers confirm this. Two or three report also
a turning of the head toward the light within the first week. The
nurse, who was intelligent and exact, thought she saw this in the case
of my niece. I did not, but I saw instead a constant turning of the
eyes toward a person coming near her--that is, toward a large dark
mass that interrupted the light. Either movement must be regarded as
entirely instinctive or reflex. Even plants will turn toward the light,
and among animal movements this is one of the most primitive; while the
habit of looking toward any dark moving mass runs far back in animal
history, and may well have become fixed in the bodily mechanism. With
the beginning of voluntary looking these instinctive movements fade.
No other sign of vision appeared in the little one during the first
fortnight. The eyes were directed to nothing, fixed on nothing. They
did not wink if one made a pass at them. There was no change of focus
for near or distant seeing; the two eyes did not even move always in
unison,--and as the lids also had by no means learned yet to move
symmetrically with the balls and with each other, some extraordinary
and alarming contortions resulted.
True seeing, such as we ourselves have, is not just a matter of opening
the eyes and letting the vision pour in; it requires a great deal of
minute muscular adjustment, both of the eyeballs and of the lenses, and
it is impossible that a baby should see anything but blurs of light and
dark (without even any distinction of distance) till he has learned the
adjustments. Not colored blurs, but light and dark only, for no trace
of color sense has ever been detected within the first fortnight of
life, no certain evidence of it even within the first year.
The baby showed no sign of hearing anything until the third day, when
she started violently at the sound of tearing paper, some eight feet
from her. After that, occasional harsh or sudden sounds--oftener the
rustling of paper than anything else--could make her start or cry.
It is well established by the careful tests of several physiologists
that babies are deaf for a period lasting from several hours to
several days after birth. The outer tube of the ear is often closed by
its own walls, and the middle ear is always stopped up with fluid. Even
after the ear itself is clear and ready for hearing, few sounds are
noticed; perhaps because the outer passage is still so narrow, perhaps
because of imperfect nerve connections with the brain, perhaps because
sounds are not distinguished, but go all together into a sort of blur,
just as the sights do. As the usual effect of sounds on wee babies is
to startle them, and to set off convulsive reflex movements, it is well
for them that hearing is so tardy in development.
There is noticeable variation in sensitiveness to hearing, not only
among different babies, but in the same baby at different times. A
sound that startles on one day seems to pass absolutely unheard on the
next.
In observing the sensibility to sound, one may easily be misled. If
a baby starts when a door slams or a heavy object falls, it is more
likely to be the jar than the sound that affects him; if he becomes
restless when one claps the hands or speaks, it may be because he felt
a puff of air on his head. The tap of an ordinary call bell is a good
sound to test with, causing neither jar nor air current.
Taste and smell were senses that the baby gave no sign of owning till
much later. The satisfaction of hunger was quite enough to account for
the contentment she showed in nursing; and when she was not hungry
she would suck the most tasteless object as cheerfully as any other.
Physiologists, however, have had the daring to make careful test of
smell and taste in the new-born, putting a wee drop of quinine, sugar,
salt, or acid solution on the babies’ tongues, and strong odors to
their noses, and have been made certain by the resulting behavior that
these senses do exist from the first. But it requires rather strong
tests to call them into action. Many babies, for instance, suck at a
two per cent. solution of quinine as if it were sugar; so it seems
unlikely that the mild and monotonous taste of milk, and the neutral
smells by which any well-kept baby is surrounded, are really perceived
at all. There are instances related of very positive discrimination
between one milk and another, either by taste or smell, shown by very
young babies; yet the weight of evidence points to an almost dormant
condition of these two senses.
We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but
psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group,
called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure,
the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal
ones of the group.
Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was touched.
She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She showed comfort
in the bath, which may have been in part due to freedom from the
contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches of the water.
She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of the nipple
on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite delicately
sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there are other
sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the feet.
On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much less
sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and perhaps
to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly tested. This
is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of heat and
cold upon the baby are unimportant.
Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and
being kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite
sensations either of heat or of cold.
The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give
impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and make
definite these impressions,--the eye at the end of the optic nerve,
the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth. Another
sense now claims almost to rank with them,--the recently studied
sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of balance
in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for no one
can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been traced to the
semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the ear is the
oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower orders of
animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists now suspect
that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have thought, and that
much which has been taken for sense of sound in the lower animals--even
as high as fishes--may perhaps be only a delicate sense of motion.
I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been
shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted and
moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she began to
balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive days there
was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young babies who
showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost equilibrium, when they
were lowered swiftly in the arms.
There is besides a sort of sensibility to vibration that affects the
whole body. We know how much of the rhythm of music may be caught
quite soundlessly through, the vibrations of the floor; and it is
said (perhaps not altogether credibly) that it was thus that Jessie
Brown recognized even the instruments and the tune at the relief of
Lucknow by the tremor along the ground before a sound was audible. A
jar, affecting the whole body, seems to be felt by creatures of very
low organization. Babies are undoubtedly quite susceptible to jarring
from the earliest days. Champney’s baby started when the scale of the
balance in which he was lying immediately after birth sprang up.
Then there is the “muscle sense”--the feeling of the action of our own
muscles; and a most delicate and important sense this is. It is safe
to say that the baby had it from the first, and felt the involuntary
movements her own little body was making, for it is hardly conceivable
how else she could have learned to make voluntary ones. But that is
another story, and comes later.
Even this does not exhaust the list of sensations the baby could feel.
There was the whole group of “organic sensations,” coming from the
inner organs,--hunger, thirst, organic pain. With older people, nausea,
suffocation, choking, and perhaps some others might be added; but
little babies certainly do not feel nausea,--their food regurgitates
without a qualm. Nor do they seem to feel disagreeable sensations when
they choke in nursing.
Organic pain our baby had her touch of in the usual form of colic;
and hunger was obviously present very early, though perhaps not in
the first two or three days. Thirst appeared from the first, and was
always imperative. Of course, the milk diet largely satisfied it, but
not entirely. Luckily our baby did not suffer from thirst, for grandma,
nurse, and the good doctor had all entered early warning that “babies
needed water,” and that many a baby was treated for colic, insomnia,
nervousness, and natural depravity, when all the poor little fellow
wanted was a spoonful of cool water. The baby’s body, as I said in my
last chapter, is largely composed of water, and the evaporation from
the loose texture of the skin is very great. After children can talk,
they wear out the most robust patience with incessant appeals, night
and day, for a “d’ink,” and consume water in quantities quite beyond
what seems rational. But their craving is doubtless a true indication
of what they need.